Anthology Encompass vs. Cadence

Importing and exporting data is failry easy. Automation for e-mail marketing is severely lacking.

Incentivized

At our college, the admissions team also uses Cadence. I think it's particularly useful for back-and-forth interactions in real time (or through an AI chatbot) My department focuses only on donors and alums. These communications are much less likely to be back-and-forth. They're more informational in nature which makes some of the features un-necessary. It's easy for a recipient to opt-out, but not easy to set up scenarios where they can opt out of specific types of texts - all-or-nothing is more likely and it's difficult for them to re-subscribe once they've opted out.

Incentivized

• It allows us to create fields as needed.
• Creating an export of data is really easy.
• Merging of records is fairly simple.

Incentivized

• easy to set up segments in order to reach certain portions of the audience
• easy opt-out for recipients
• simple reporting after texts are sent

Incentivized

• A more inclusive duplicate identification tool would be great.
• QR tickets for event registrants would be great and move you into this century.
• Allowing more flexibility with event creation is vital to us at this time.
• Additional automation would be great. Email event info, then to those not registered, then a reminder to those registered. Now it is entirely manual throughout the entire process.

Incentivized

• There is built-in connection with Raiser's Edge NXT but the field mapping is overly complicated and setting it up requires action both on customer end and Cadence end
• Cannot update a bad email address without deleting the record and re-importing it
• Cannot simply add records - must be done through import from a spreadsheet
• assigning a record to a user can only be done during initial import

Incentivized

It does not have the automation or event tools that we are desperately needing at this time.

Incentivized

The software is old and complicated. Not very intuitive to learn.

Incentivized

It is usually up and running.

Incentivized

No integration.

Incentivized

I usually get an accurate response to issues. Your service techs are knowledgeable in how the software works and is set up.

Incentivized

N/A I've only attended webinar training, which is great when you are on live, not so much when watching a recording.

Incentivized

Most are recorded, so questions that arise are not easy to get answered.

Incentivized

Unknown. I wasn't here.

Incentivized

None others to date.

Incentivized

We are currently evaluating Mailchimp's SMS option to see if the price for adding that feature is less than what we are paying for Cadence. Currently we are ONLY using Mailchimp for email communications, but the interface is much more user friendly. We have not yet had a chance to demo the SMS feature to compare it to Cadence, but we plan to check it out.

Incentivized

• The cleanup process is very painful due to lack of any automation
• Identity checkpoint would be great if we could control the fields being matched.

Incentivized

• Too early (one year) to have hard ROI info, but we have had constituents who have indicated a preference for text as their primary means of interacting with our organization.
• Even with the integration with Raiser's Edge NXT it takes time to update the database with opt-outs.
• We have fewer constituents with mobile numbers than those with email addresses. We will have to appeal to our constituents to share mobile numbers with us

Incentivized